The use of a radio communications device (cellular telephone, pager, etc.) within a building or other structure often poses a transception (transmission and reception) problem. This is especially true when the structure involved has a barrier which substantially attenuates electromagnetic radiation. Such a barrier may be the walls of a building, the roof of a tunnel, the hull of a ship, the fuselage of an airplane, etc. The solution to this transception problem is the use of a repeater.
Exemplarily, a cellular base station requires communication with a cellular telephone within a building. The walls of the building act as a barrier and attenuate the signals between the base station and cellular telephone to the point where direct communication is not possible. A repeater is required for the communication to take place.
The repeater, in its simplest form, may be nothing more than two transceivers coupled back-to-back via coaxial cable. In this example, the first transceiver has its antenna located outside the barrier (e.g. on the roof of the building) where it maintains clear transception with the cellular base station. The second transceiver has its antenna located within the barrier (e.g. inside the building walls) where it maintains clear transception with the cellular telephone. The coaxial cable connects the two transceivers and provides a path for intra-repeater signals between the transceivers. In this manner, the base station and the cellular telephone may communicate indirectly, i.e. through the repeater, even though the cellular telephone is blocked by the barrier from communicating directly with the base station. The repeater bridges the barrier.
The exemplary coaxial cable connecting the two transceivers is a communication infrastructure and a fixture of the building itself.
With communication services becoming increasingly proliferous, individual buildings often require multiple repeaters to fulfill the communication needs of the occupants. Traditionally, these additional repeaters require additional communication infrastructures.
Since the communication infrastructures are fixtures of the building, they are best installed during building construction. For existing buildings, installation during construction is not possible, and additional communication infrastructures must be retrofitted. Such retrofitting is inherently difficult, time-consuming, intrusive, and expensive.
Additionally, some structures may require amplification of the intra-repeater signals to overcome path loss due to long transmission lines, low angenna gain, internal barriers (e.g. ships with steel decks), transmission lengths (e.g. long tunnels), etc. In such cases, multiple communication infrastructures require multiple amplifiers, with attendant expenses.
It is the purpose of the current invention to overcome these and other problems.